her.

While the suspense lasted she could not write home as frankly as before,
and she sent off letters to Middlemount which treated of her delay in
Venice with helpless reticence. They would have set another sort of
household intolerably wondering and suspecting, but she had the comfort
of knowing that her father would probably settle the whole matter by
saying that she would tell what she meant when she got round to it; and
apart from this she had mainly the comfort of the vice-consul's society.
He had little to do besides looking after her, and he employed himself
about this in daily visits which the padrone and his wife regarded as
official, and promoted with a serious respect for the vice-consular
dignity. If the visits ended, as they often did, in a turn on the Grand
Canal, and an ice in the Piazza, they appealed to the imagination of
more sophisticated witnesses, who decided that the young American girl
had inherited the millions of the sick lady, and become the betrothed
of the vice-consul, and that they were thus passing the days of their
engagement in conformity to the American custom, however much at
variance with that of other civilizations.

This view of the affair was known to Maddalena, but not to Clementina,
who in those days went back in many things to the tradition of her life
at Middlemount. The vice-consul was of a tradition almost as simple, and
his longer experience set no very wide interval between them. It
quickly came to his telling her all about his dead wife and his married
daughters, and how, after his home was broken up, he thought he would
travel a little and see what that would do for him. He confessed that
it had not done much; he was always homesick, and he was ready to go as
soon as the President sent out a consul to take his job off his hands.
He said that he had not enjoyed himself so much since he came to Venice
as he was doing now, and that he did not know what he should do if
Clementina first got her call home. He betrayed no curiosity as to
the peculiar circumstances of her stay, but affected to regard it as
something quite normal, and he watched over her in every way with a
fatherly as well as an official vigilance which never degenerated into
the semblance of any other feeling. Clementina rested in his care in
entire security. The world had quite fallen from her, or so much of it
as she had seen at Florence, and in her indifference she lapsed into
life as it was in the time bef